2 weeks Ago By Ricky Leong
With the help of a few “earth angels,” St. Albert nurse Shannon Boddez has taken 207 hockey bags of medical supplies to help beleaguered Ukrainian defenders and their communities. Eastward bound on her tenth mercy mission this week, Boddez is thinking about winter looming in Eastern Europe.
“Winter is coming in Ukraine, and the defenders need hand warmers when they’re in the trenches,” she said. When Russia invaded Ukraine’s east, Boddez felt devastated. Her “Baba” Kilarski left Ukraine for Canada in the 1920s, when she was 14, and Boddez had accompanied her on a trip back 75 years later; it immediately felt like her homeland, too.
A social media post to colleagues generated a quick response. “Everybody at work was messaging me: ‘What can we do? How can we help?’” she recalled. “Friends said, ‘Well, we have stuff, or we used to do medical missions, but we lost our contacts due to Covid.
“ She made a post, appealing for unopened, unused items—Polysporin, clean socks, Bandaids, and gauze. “I walked into the room and I actually burst into tears, because I was expecting, you know, a couple of cans of food, maybe some diapers and socks. There was 116 kilograms of stuff,” she said.
Donations from colleagues and friends with friends in the medical field snowballed. “They’ve been my earth angels that have made all this possible,” she said. “You always find like-minded individuals who wish to support the Ukrainians in their brave fight for freedom.
” To date, Boddez has delivered an estimated 6,624 kilos of supplies. It’s cheaper for her to fly, accompanied by the bags with the help of humanitarian baggage allowances from Air Canada, than to ship the scarce items—defibrillators, tourniquets, foil emergency blankets, individual first aid pouches, IV lines, catheters, tubing, suction canisters, even ECG machines and portable ultrasounds from clinics, organizations and pharmacies throughout the Edmonton region. Tim Hawirko, owner of Alberta Paramedical Services, has been an active donor for the last two years, contributing front-line medical equipment such as defibrillators, airways, and other needed medical supplies.
“The beauty of it is a lot of this is donated. If I had to pay this all out of pocket, it wouldn’t be feasible,” she said. A retiring Edmonton doctor sent a working defibrillator.
“He had grown up in the Ukrainian community near Bon Accord,” she said. Particularly priceless: scarce heart medicine, still sealed, still effective, but deemed just barely expired for use on Canadian patients due to stringent regulations—like flour just past its best-by date. That made its way to a cardiology hospital that had just one dose left in its safe.
“The most amazing thing is when they see these incredible medications, they don’t take more than what they need, which I think is beautiful. They’ll find a hospital in Lviv or Dnipro that could use these. They network,” she said.
Anxious about the war, one Edmonton boy wanted to buy hand warmers and rescue blankets. “My friend in Ukraine made a video of me handing them over, and he read the letter out and said, ‘This is going out east,’” she recalled. After seeing the video, the lad had his first good night of sleep in a long while, his mother reported.
Students from the city’s Ukrainian bilingual schools and St. Albert schools send cards for the defenders. “You get messages or photos of these being with the defenders on the front line, and how these messages from Canada just cheer them right up, because they know that across the world, people know what’s going on and they’re being thought of,” she said.
The St. Albert Hockey Association provided old hockey bags. Friends come to help sort and pack.
A woman brings items from Olds several times a year. Families no longer in need of home care give the remainder of sealed supplies that would still technically be considered contaminated and unsuited to return. “If it’s frontline stuff like gauze compresses, an expiry date isn’t going to kill the person who needs it,” Boddez said.
Shannon Boddez delivers the materials in western Ukraine, where it’s relatively safe, to be distributed east by volunteer organizations. Although she has briefly ventured east into formerly occupied zones for special deliveries, there are practical reasons to stay in safer areas. “If something goes sideways, I’m an extra body in an area where they’re going to have to help me.
I can’t help them,” she said. “One of our cab drivers in Lviv said his son was out in the east, and he needed specific things. When we got back to the hotel, we asked him to wait, we quickly made a kit for him to give to his son.
” Shannon Bodez finds her motivation on the ground, with the recipients. “It’s the spirit of the Ukrainian people, and their resilience and resolve to not give Russia an inch that’s amazing,” she said. “When I go there, I think because I’ve been with my Baba there, I just feel her whispering in my ear the whole time.
And that motivates me to keep going.” She gets photos from defenders and their families, and personal notes, which she shares with donors. “My friend there says she can’t leave Ukraine because she won’t leave her husband (on the frontlines), She said ‘You are bringing the world to us.
Your visit is bringing like a breath of fresh air to us.’ “It’s definitely the hardest and most rewarding thing I’ve ever done ..
. It comes from a village of people. It really does.
If it makes everybody feel good, then everybody benefits and contributes. My goal is to give credit to those who help make this happen, and also to continue to raise awareness, so that people know the war is still going on, and people can contribute in ways they didn’t know they could. I’m so grateful to all of the people that help, because if I didn’t have people helping me, I would just be a girl with empty hockey bags.
”.
